Human-Computer Integration (HInt) is an emerging paradigm in which computational and human systems are closely interwoven. Integrating computers with the human body is not new. however, we believe that with rapid technological advancements, increasing real-world deployments, and growing ethical and societal implications, it is critical to identify an agenda for future research. We present a set of challenges for HInt research, formulated over the course of a five-day workshop consisting of 29 experts who have designed, deployed and studied HInt systems. This agenda aims to guide researchers in a structured way towards a more coordinated and conscientious future of human-computer integration.

With the rise of big data, there has been an increasing need for practitioners in this space and an increasing opportunity for researchers to understand their workflows and design new tools to improve it. Data science is often described as data-driven, comprising unambiguous data and proceeding through regularized steps of analysis. However, this view focuses more on abstract processes, pipelines, and workflows, and less on how data science workers engage with the data. In this paper, we build on the work of other CSCW and HCI researchers in describing the ways that scientists, scholars, engineers, and others work with their data, through analyses of interviews with 21 data science professionals. We set five approaches to data along a dimension of interventions: Data as given; as captured; as curated; as designed; and as created. Data science workers develop an intuitive sense of their data and processes, and actively shape their data. We propose new ways to apply these interventions analytically, to make sense of the complex activities around data practices.

We are interested in increasing the ability of groups to collaborate efficiently by leveraging new advances in AI and Conversational Agent (CA) technology. Given the longstanding debate on the necessity of embodiment for CAs, bringing them to groups requires answering the questions of whether and how providing a CA with a face affects its interaction with the humans in a group. We explored these questions by comparing group decision-making sessions facilitated by an embodied agent, versus a voice-only agent. Results of an experiment with 20 user groups revealed that while the embodiment improved various aspects of group's social perception of the agent (e.g., rapport, trust, intelligence, and power), its impact on the group-decision process and outcome was nuanced. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative findings, we discuss the pros and cons of embodiment, argue that the value of having a face depends on the types of assistance the agent provides, and lay out directions for future research.

Gaze is a powerful form of social feedback, providing cues about attention and interest, and boredom and distraction. We designed a working prototype that enabled remote participants in a collocated meeting to look around the local meeting space, and that showed local participants where the remote participants' "simulated gazes" (that is, their virtual cameras) were directed. Of course, pointing a camera is not the same as gazing, and so we conducted a study to understand how simulated gazes might be used, and to what extent they would be experienced as social cues. Findings range from the use of simulated gaze to signal attention, to ways in which local and remote participants experienced these simulated gazes. These findings illustrate the value of indirection and abstraction in presenting social cues; raise issues of privacy, visibility, and participation asymmetry; and suggest implications for design and further research.

Meetings are often seen solely as a site of collective work. However, as McGrath has noted, groups are concerned with much more than collective work. In this study we examine how individuals experience meetings, and ask what they do, why they do it, and how they feel about it. Our study focuses on recurring meetings, both because recurring meetings are an ordinary aspect of organization life, and because their routine nature lends them a casual character that distinguishes them from one-time, issue-focused meetings. This paper analyzes accounts of 19 meetings and examines how various peripheral activities -- side-talk, side-tracking, multi-tasking, pre- and post-meeting talk -- have positive effects, as well as negative ones. We argue that viewing recurring meetings as a confluence of individual and collective aims suggests new approaches for designing technology that supports both meetings and participants.

As machine learning (ML) becomes increasingly popular, developers without deep experience in ML - who we will refer to as ML practitioners - are facing the need to diagnose problems with ML models. Yet successful diagnosis requires high-level expertise that practitioners lack. As in many complex data-oriented domains, visualization could help. This two-phase study explored the design of visualizations to aid ML diagnosis. In phase 1, twelve ML practitioners were asked to diagnose a model using ten state-of-the-art visualizations; seven design themes were identified. In phase 2, several design themes were embodied in an interactive visualization. The visualization was used to engage practitioners in a participatory design exercise that explored how they would carry out multi-step diagnosis using the visualization. Our findings provide design implications for tools that better support ML diagnosis by non-expert practitioners.

Intelligent systems are gaining in popularity and receiving increased media attention, but little is known about how people actually go about developing them. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap through a set of field interviews that investigate how people develop intelligent systems that incorporate machine learning algorithms. The developers we interviewed were experienced at working with machine learning algorithms and dealing with the large amounts of data needed to develop intelligent systems. Despite their level of experience, we learned that they struggle to establish a repeatable process. They described problems with each step of the processes they perform, as well as cross-cutting issues that pervade multiple steps of their processes. The unique difficulties that developers like these face seem to point to a need for software engineering advances that address such machine learning systems, and we conclude by discussing this need and some of its implications.

We interviewed adults with mild cognitive impairment working in a sheltered workshop and three support professionals about competitive employment in the community, and what concerns or barriers they may have. While individuals were most concerned about managing their health, professionals also described personal safety and productivity challenges. Families' worries about the safety of their family members were reported to be a barrier to competitive employment. Using a smart watch as a technology probe, we identified three potential applications of wearable technology in tackling these challenges: health support, family support, and productivity support.

This paper describes the Dubuque Electricity Portal, a city-scale system aimed at supporting voluntary reductions of electricity consumption. The Portal provided each household with fine-grained feedback on its electricity use, as well as using incentives, comparisons, and goal setting to encourage conservation. Logs, a survey and interviews were used to evaluate the user experience of the Portal during a 20-week pilot with 765 volunteer households. Although the volunteers had already made a wide range of changes to conserve electricity prior to the pilot, those who used the Portal decreased their electricity use by about 3.7%. They also reported increased understanding of their usage, and reported taking an array of actions - both changing their behavior and their electricity infrastructure. The paper discusses the experience of the system's users, and describes challenges for the design of ECF systems, including balancing accessibility and security, a preference for time-based visualizations, and the advisability of multiple modes of feedback, incentives and information presentation.

The Dubuque Water Portal is a system aimed at supporting voluntary reductions of water consumption that is intended to be deployed city-wide. It provides each household with fine-grained, near real time feedback on their water consumption, as well as using techniques like social comparison, weekly games, and news and chat to encourage water conservation. This study used logs, a survey and interviews to evaluate a 15-week pilot with 303 households. It describes the Portal's design, and discusses its adoption, use and impacts. The system resulted in a 6.6% decrease in water consumption, and the paper employs qualitative methods to look at the ways in which the Portal was (or wasn't) effective in supporting its users and enabling them to reduce their consumption. The paper concludes with a discussion of design implications for residential feedback systems, and possible engagement models.

This paper presents the first in-depth evaluation of a large multi-format virtual conference. The conference took place in an avatar-based 3D virtual world with spatialized audio, and had keynote, poster and social sessions. We studied it by drawing on logs, a survey and interviews with 30 participants. We develop a model - Coalescence, Focused Interaction, Remixing (CoFIRe) -- of large synchronous interactions, and use it to discuss how the technology supported, or failed to support, the interactions that are the raison d'etre of conferences. We conclude by discussing the prospects for such large virtual gatherings.

Online communities produce rich behavioral datasets, e.g., Usenet news conversations, Wikipedia edits, and Facebook friend networks. Analysis of such datasets yields important insights (like the "long tail" of user participation) and suggests novel design interventions (like targeting users with personalized opportunities and work requests). However, certain key user data typically are unavailable, specifically viewing, pre-registration, and non-logged-in activity. The absence of data makes some questions hard to answer; ac- cess to it can strengthen, extend, or cast doubt on previous results. We report on analysis of user behavior in Cyclopath, a geographic wiki and route-finder for bicyclists. With access to viewing and non-logged-in activity data, we were able to: (a) replicate and extend prior work on user lifecycles in Wikipedia, (b) bring to light some pre-registration activity, thus testing for the presence of "educational lurking," and (c) demonstrate the locality of geographic activity and how editing and viewing are geographically correlated.

Assistance - work carried out by one entity in support of another - is a concept of long-standing interest, both as a type of human work common in organizations and as a model of how computational systems might interact with humans. Surprisingly, the perhaps most paradigmatic form of assistance - the work of administrative assistants or secretaries - has received almost no attention. This paper reports on a study of assistants, and their principals and managers, laying out a model of their work, the skills and competencies they need to function effectively, and reflects on implications for the design of systems and organizations.

IBM Enhanced Audio Conferencing (IEAC) is a VoIP-based audio conferencing system that, like several other systems, provides a visualization showing who is present and their states (e.g., speaking, muted). This paper presents the first study of the use of such a system. Drawing on log files collected over six weeks of use by over 1300 corporate employees, and interviews with 10 of them, we look at how and why various features of the system are used and what sorts of practices are supported. Our findings shed light on the factors that drive the use of visual enhancements to audio conferencing, and suggest further research topics.

Loops is a text-based computer mediated communication system aimed at small- to medium-sized corporate work groups. We begin by discussing the goals of the system and the rationale behind its design, particularly its treatment of non-conversational text. Next we describe its realization in an implemented system, and discuss how an early working version of the system was'group tested,' and the changes that lead to. We then discuss its deployment within our organization, and provide examples of how it's used. We conclude with reflections on the usage patterns of Loops and their implications for the design of similar systems.

IBM Community Tools (ICT) is a synchronous broadcast messaging system in use by a very large, globally distributed organization. ICT is interesting for a number of reasons, including its scale of use (thousands of users per day), its usage model of employing large scale broadcast to strangers to initiate small group interactions, and the fact that it is a synchronous system used across multiple time zones. In this paper we characterize the use of ICT in its context, examine the activities for which it is used, the motivations of its users, and the values they derive from it. We also explore problems with the system, and look at the social and technical ways in which users deal with them.

Rendezvous is a conference call solution that leverages Voice over IP, enterprise calendaring, instant messaging, and rich client functionality to enhance the user experience and effectiveness of distributed meetings. We describe the service, and two of its user experience innovations -- the conference call proxy and iHelp -- which function as digital backchannels. We present results from a preliminary user evaluation, and discuss our notion of digital backchannels with respect to the social translucence framework.

Online communities are extremely popular; yet most of them still rely primarily on text for knowledge creation and communication. This paper describes a graphical Webpoll prototype - a mix of information, knowledge, and social visualization - that has been designed and deployed in an online discussion board on herbal antidepressants. The prototype, hereby named the "plot-poll", allows users to collaboratively construct a sequence of mini histograms that indicate experienced mood change during a ten week period. The pilot study shows that plot-polling is quite effective in engaging low-frequency contributors to participate. More work is required to support these findings, and reveal whether the graphic format is able to provide affective qualities to the user experience

This paper describes an approach to managing tasks and processes that are distributed across a large number of people. The basic idea is to use a social visualization called a task proxy to create a shared awareness amongst the participants in a task or process. The process awareness provided by the task proxy enables its users to monitor the task state, the states of participants, and to communicate with those in particular states. We describe the concept, a first prototype, its evaluation, and discuss future directions.

This paper examines the way in which a knowledge management system (KMS)-by which we mean the people, processes and software-came into being and evolved in response to a variety of shifting social, technical and organizational pressures. We draw upon data from a two year ethnographic study of a sophisticated help desk to trace the KMS from its initial conception as a "Common Problems" database for help desk personnel, to its current instantiation as a set of Frequently Asked Questions published on an intranet for help desk clients. We note how shifts in management, organizational structure, incentives, software technologies, and other factors affected the development of the system. This study sheds light on some of the difficulties that accompany the implementation of CSCW systems, and provides an analysis of how such systems are often designed by bricolage.

This paper presents a case study of a globally distributed work group's use of an online environment called "Loops." Loops is a web-based persistent chat system whose aim is to support collaboration amongst corporate work groups. We describe the ways in which the group turned the system's features to its own ends, and the unusual usage rhythm that corresponded with the team's varying needs for communication as it moved through its work cycle. We conclude with a discussion of design implications, and a suggestion that "community" may not always be the best way to think about groups' use of online systems.

Many CSCW projects dealing with individual availability and interruption filtering achieve only limited success. Perhaps this is because designers of such systems have limited evidence to draw upon; most data on interruption management is at least a decade old. This study uses an empirical sampling method and qualitative interviews to examine attitudes toward availability and interruption. Specifically, we analyze how corporate research managers spend their time and look at how their attitudes toward interruption relate to their various activities. Attitudes toward interruption are marked by a complex tension between wanting to avoid interruption and appreciating its usefulness. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for design, suggesting that the notion of socially translucent systems may be a fruitful approach

We are interested in desiging systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computing networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activites visible to one another. We call such systems “socially translucent systems” and suggest that they have three characteristics—visbility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another. To motivate and focus our ideas we develop a vision of knowledge communities, conversationally based systems that support the creation, management and reuse of knowledge in a social context. We describe our experience in designing and deploying one layer of functionality for knowledge communities, embodied in a working system called “Barbie” and discuss research issues raised by a socially translucent approach to design.

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and intemctive properties such as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation of users and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discuss a prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson labs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.

This article describes the design and use of a personal electronic notebook.The findings provide a useful data point for those interested in the issue of how to design highly customizable systems for managing personal information.After a description of the notebook's interface and the usag6 practices that have co-evolved with the interface, I discuss some of the features which have made the notebook useful over the long term, and trends in the evolution of its design.

A visualization goal is to simplify the analysis of large-quantity, numerical data by rendering the data as an image that can be intuitively manipulated. The question the article addresses is whether or not virtual reality techniques are the cure-all to the dilemma of visualizing increasing amounts of data. It determines the usefulness of techniques available today and in the near future that will ease the problem of visualizing complex data. In regards to visualization, the article discusses characteristics of virtual reality systems, data in three-dimensional environments, augmented reality, and virtual reality market opportunities.>

Interfaces for information access and retrieval are a long way from the ideal of the electronic book that you can cuddle up with in bed. Nevertheless, today's interfaces are coming closer to supporting browsing, selection, and retrieval of remote information by nontechnical users. This article describes five interfaces to distributed systems of servers that have been designed and implemented: WAIStation for the Macintosh, XWAIS for X-Windows, GWAIS for Gnu-Emacs, SWAIS for dumb terminals, and Rosebud for the Macintosh. These interfaces talk to one of two server systems: the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) system on the internet, and the Rosebud Server System, on an internal network at Apple Computer. Both server systems are built on Z39.50, a standard protocol, and thus support access to a wide range of remote databases. The interfaces described here reflect a variety of design constraints. Such constraints range from the mundane—coping with dumb terminals and limited screen space—to the challenging. Among the challenges addressed are how to provide passive alerts, how to make information easily scannable, and how to support retrieval and browsing by nontechnical users. There are a variety of other issues which have received little or no attention, including budgeting money for access to “for pay” databases, privacy, and how to assist users in finding out which of a large (changing) set of databases holds relevant information. We hope that the challenges we have identified, as well as the existence and public availability of source code for the WAIS system, will serve as a stimulus for further design work on interfaces for information retrieval. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This paper describes the first phase of a project to create a desktop information system for general users.The approach was to observe the problems, needs, and practices of several groups of information users, and to use these observations to drive the interface design of a prototype.In the first section of the paper, we describe problems which arise in the use of a relevance feedback system for information retrieval.In the second and third sections, we look at the needs and practices of users of both electronic and paper-based information systems.In the final section, we briefly describe the resulting design.